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Daily 9.30am-5pm; $8; special exhibitions extra; 30min tours 10am-3pm on the hour; www.austmus.gov.au. Museum, Town Hall or Kings Cross CityRail. Facing Hyde Park across College Street, at the junction of William Street as it heads up to Kings Cross, the Australian Museum is primarily a museum of natural history, with an interest in human evolution and Aboriginal culture and history. The collection was founded in 1827, but the actual building, a grand sandstone affair with a facade of Corinthian pillars, wasn't fully finished until the 1860s and was extended in the 1980s. The core of the old museum are the three levels of the Long Gallery , Australia's first exhibition gallery, opened in 1855 to a Victorian-era public keen to gawk at the colony's curiosities. Many of the Heritage-listed displays of the following hundred years remain here, contrasting with a very modern approach in the rest of the museum. On the ground floor , the impressive Indigenous Australian exhibition looks at the history of Australia's Aboriginal people from the Dreaming to contemporary issues of the "stolen generation". The ground-floor level of the Long Gallery houses the Skeletons exhibit, where you can see a skeletal human going through the motions of riding a bicycle, for example. Level 1 is devoted to minerals, but far more exciting are the disparate collections on level 2 - especially the Long Gallery's Birds and Insects exhibit, which includes chilling contextual displays of dangerous spiders such as redbacks and funnelwebs. Past this section is the Biodiversity: life supporting life exhibition, which looks at the impact of environmental change on the ecosystems of Australian animals, plants and micro-organisms, eighty percent of which do not naturally occur elsewhere, giving the country one of the highest levels of biodiversity in the world. Search and Discover is aimed at both adults and children, a flora and fauna identification centre with internet access and books to consult. The Human Evolution gallery traces the development of fossil evidence worldwide and ends with an exploration of archeological evidence of Aboriginal occupation of Australia. A separate section, More Than Dinosaurs , deals with fossil skeletons of dinosaurs and giant marsupials: best of all is the model of the largest of Australia's megafauna, the wombat-like Diprotodon, which may have roamed the mainland as recently as ten thousand years ago.
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